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Now, one of the stories going around — and it\u2019s been going around awhile — is all of the disparity in income, the gap between the rich and the poor. And depending on what story you read, the middle class is about to be wiped out. There isn\u2019t going to be one much longer. Because the middle-class people are not moving north and upward, out of the middle class. They are moving south, and they\u2019re getting closer to poverty and near-poverty. And while that\u2019s happening, the rich are getting richer, and it\u2019s just not fair. James Pethokoukis, the American Enterprise Institute, writing at the American blog. Headline: “Obama\u2019s Inequality Argument Just Utterly Collapsed.” Here\u2019s the pull-quote from his piece: “[A]ll income levels got richer.<\/p>\n
“Yes, the very rich did exceptionally well, mostly due to technology and globalization. Incomes rose 63% for the top 5%, 56% for the top 10% and 52.6% for the top 20%. But everyone else made out pretty well, too. Incomes rose 40.4% for households between the 60th and 80th percentiles, 36.9% for the next quintile, 25.0% for the next, and 26.4% for the bottom 20%. There\u00c2\u2019s the ‘shared prosperity\u2019 Obama says he wants, right in front of his eyes. … President Barack Obama has a theory of the case, yes he does. For the past 30 years, the living standards of middle-class Americans have gone nowhere even as the overall US economy has grown markedly. The Obama explanation: Wealthier Americans grabbed all the money. Time to raise their taxes for the sake of ‘fairness.'”<\/p>\n
And because they do that, there simply isn\u2019t enough left to go around for everybody else.<\/p>\n
So what we have to do is take, in the form of tax increases, the money away from those evil rich people and then somehow give it back to the people who really would have it if the rich hadn\u2019t stolen it from \u2019em. They believe in a zero-sum game, and that\u2019s best defined as saying liberals believe that if somebody gets a $10,000 raise, then somebody else had their salary cut $10,000. If somebody gets a job, somebody gets fired. Zero-sum game. There\u2019s no growth! They don\u2019t believe in overall GDP growth, and they don\u2019t believe that there\u2019s enough to go around. And that is what informs and animates their policies.<\/p>\n
“Here\u00c2\u2019s Obama in January 2009: ‘Middle class Americans have been working harder, yet not enjoying their fair share of the fruits of a growing economy.\u2019 Here\u00c2\u2019s Obama in Osawatomie, Kansas, last December: ‘Over the last few decades, the rungs on the ladder of opportunity have grown farther and farther apart, and the middle class has shrunk.\u2019 And here\u00c2\u2019s Obama this week: ‘What drags our entire economy down is when the benefits of economic growth and productivity go only to the few, which is what\u00c2\u2019s been happening for over a decade now, and gap between those at the very, very top and everybody else keeps growing wider and wider and wider and wider.\u2019 Underlying Obama\u00c2\u2019s entire thesis is the work of two economists, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.<\/p>\n
“According to them, median American incomes rose just 3.2% from 1979 through 2007.” Yet over that same period, GDP rose 67%. “So what happened to the rest of the [money]?” Well, according to Obama, “The top 10%, 1% and 0.1% grabbed all the money. Or pretty much most of it.” They just took it because we\u2019re in a “you\u2019re on your own” economy and they\u2019re better on their own than other people are. They know how to take it when others don\u2019t know how to keep it. So because of that it\u2019s, “Time to crank up taxes on the rich and spend more on the middle class. It\u00c2\u2019s not overstating things to say that the findings of [these two economists] Piketty and Saez form the very heart of Obamanomics, giving a powerful economic rationale for Obama policies such as ending the upper-end Bush tax cuts to Obamacare to the Buffett Rule.”<\/p>\n
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<\/a>And speaking of the Bush tax cuts, Ezra Klein in the Washington Post yesterday: “On Taxes, George W. Bush Has Won — Democrats have, for the most part, admitted that Bush was right, and the Clinton-era tax rates were too high on most Americans. For all that Democrats talk about returning to the Clinton-era tax rates, they only ever mean for the top two percent of taxpayers — the folks who are now in the 35% bracket, but whom they would like to see in a 39.6% bracket.”<\/p>\n